Deeplinks Blog posts about Digital Video

The story so far: the MPAA's
href="http://p2pnet.net/story/6629">multi-million dollar travelling
salesmen had descended on Washington, pitching and wheedling to get the
href="http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/three_minute_guide.php">Broadcast
Flag language, which would give Hollywood control of your digital TV and a
veto on future TV tech, into law.

In the House, the MPAA shenagled twenty representatives to support the Flag in the House Commerce Committee. But that's not a majority and support is
wobbly. Following your
letters and phone calls to members of the committee, opposition has firmed
up and, apparently, after reading one long explanation from one expert voter,
at least one representative regrets signing the MPAA's letter.

Not long ago we updated you on the MPAA and RIAA's shenanigans to smuggle the Broadcast Flag through the United States Senate. Those who paid attention during "Schoolhouse Rock" will realize that's only half of the duo's burden. To make the Flag law, they must march it past the House of Representatives, too.

Now the second shoe has dropped: 20 members of the House sent an open letter to Congressman Fred Upton, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet (part of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce), and its ranking member, Edward J. Markey. All 20 pledged their allegiance to the Broadcast Flag.

A European standards body is laying the ground for a sweeping mandate that mirrors and exceeds the US Broadcast Flag proposal. The European version of the Broadcast Flag promises to ban open source, compromise user freedom, and give entertainment companies a veto over the future of digital television technology.

Imagine you're a happy-go-lucky conglomerate of Hollywood media companies.
Faced with some tweaks to your business model that you'd rather not
contemplate, your members have conceived of an ingenious alternative:
compelling tech companies to implement shoddy copy-protection on every digital
AV-enabled computer in the land.

Your "Broadcast Flag," while undoubtedly quite brilliant and only slightly
delusional, has been running into a few problems recently. First, after it wastorn to shreds by techies in its drafting committee, you had to shout more than usual to get the FCC to adopt it.

Yesterday, our colleagues at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) published recommendations [PDF] for Congress should it choose to reinstate the broadcast flag, which EFF and a coalition of organizations defeated in court. While we admire CDT's tortured attempt to make the broadcast flag seem reasonable, its suggestions are flawed. That was inevitable--the broadcast flag is fundamentally flawed policy and should be scrapped entirely.